You know what they say: you never get a second chance to make a first impression. These days it's most likely that impression will be online. In this piece, we consider the top five mistakes businesses make online that leave a bad taste in customers' mouths.

Big Data

Given their reliance on statistics, data scientists were stunned when Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Did the faulty numbers and broken algorithms signal the death of Big Data? Or did they underscore the fact that this is a nascent field? The Monday-morning quarterbacking continues, but certain factors may lead to better best practices and a more conscientious climate. At a minimum, the need for higher quality data, sharper code writing, and more contextual, nuanced analysis is apparent.

Reltio, the enterprise data-driven applications and modern data management Platform as a Service (PaaS) company, announced it has secured Series C funding in the amount of $40 million—a clear sign of investors' confidence in the company's momentum and strong business prospects. Reltio Cloud is a multitenant PaaS that enables organizations to build data-driven applications with reliable master data management (MDM), relevant big data insights, and intelligent recommended actions.

Orbis Technologies, Inc. and RSI Content Solutions announced the merger of the two companies. The merger creates a global Big Data company that provides software and services around the world. The combined operating entity will assume the Orbis Technologies, Inc name with corporate headquarters in Annapolis, MD. This company immediately assumes a market leader role in global enterprise content and information management with products and solutions deployed around the world.

Big Data and journalism are becoming inextricably linked. Currently, we seem to be embarking on the slippery slope of presenting statistics and data analysis as solid evidence, sans clarification or context. Even Nate Silver of the FiveThirtyEight website, after putting Donald Trump's chances of becoming the Republican nominee at 12% to 13%, waited to clarify the rationale behind the prediction. To some, a U.S. presidential election feels life-altering. That is literally the case when data are being run through algorithms and used to make decisions, such as mortgage qualification or university admittance.

Arkadium announced the release of InHabit, its new "dynamic editorial" technology. InHabit's patent-pending technology reads any article and automatically inserts an interactive editorial unit designed to both engage the reader and factually and functionally extend the article it appears on.

Tenjin, a mobile marketing infrastructure company, announced partnerships with Looker, the company that is powering data-driven businesses, and Chartio, the cloud-based data exploration solution, to enable app marketers to access, analyze and act on their data more effectively and efficiently.

It's January 2017, and you've turned over the digital calendar page on a new year. Was your resolution to walk an extra 1,000 steps a week this year, to be tracked by your Apple Watch, shared on Facebook for extra accountability, and added to your Lifetick goal-tracking web app? Congratulations—you've both added to and exemplified the state of Big Data in 2017.

In marketing, we've reached an inflection point where the volume of data and processes required to run personalization initiatives at scale have outstripped human capability (even highly skilled ones). The micro-targeted customer experience is simply unsustainable with a traditional technology stack leveraging manual data modeling and human-curated, rules-based decisioning.

For the past several years, in addition to working professionally with commercial enterprise data, I have been the self-designated genealogist in my family. I have learned that there is simply no substitute for first-party data. This truism applies, of course, to my professional and personal work with data.

Just do it. I'm lovin' it. Diamonds are forever. You know these words in part because they've been very carefully chosen to appeal to audiences. But as Paul Blamire, VP of client experience at Atomic Reach, told an audience at the Gilbane Digital Content Conference, it's about more than the words themselves—it's also about structure, what device people are reading on, and the emotions they evoke when this all works together. According to Blamire, machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) can help marketers get the words and their structure right for more people on more devices.

MTV's first music video, The Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star," became stuck in my head when I read that Facebook EMEA VP Nicola Mendelsohn declared that Facebook will be "all video" in 5 years. Mendelsohn said that text has been declining every year and that Facebook users now view videos 8 billion times per day, up from 1 billion a year ago. Apparently, Facebook thinks video will kill off text, sooner rather than later.

An analysis of nearly 350 content marketing campaigns based on data-driven visualizations by Fractl revealed even traditionally dull industries can leverage visual assets, and that more interesting verticals could add some creativity to their content to boost engagement. Here are the four primary data visualizations big brands and publishers alike have leveraged for engagement in niche verticals, and some takeaways for marketers trying to get into this growing trend.

As Sam Roe wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) article, for many years, "investigative reporters have approached stories with a similar mindset: Find the bad guys," and "copy down what people said and leave it at that." Big Data, the big disrupter of all industries, might alter that approach. The collection of massive amounts of data has caused practitioners in many fields to reconsider how they do business.

Cambridge Semantics, a provider of graph-based Smart Data discovery and exploratory analytic solutions, announced the release of an enhanced product version of its Anzo Smart Data Lake solution with the ability to combine, manage, and analyze all of an enterprise's data in one place.

Data has emerged as a key player in the marketing and media sphere. There isn't a single member of the six biggest media corporations in the U.S. or the big five global ad agencies that hasn't made data an integral part of its sales pitch to the marketplace. However, there remains some confusion regarding what exactly is meant by "data" and why it's so valuable. As a result of this lack of clarity, I will address what we mean when we talk about it, as well as why it's so valuable for media and marketing companies.

Small businesses that use data to help make decisions are more strongly growing revenue as compared to their counterparts who use data on a limited basis, according to new research from Exact and Pb7. The findings show that businesses across the U.S. and Europe who lean on data insights reported revenue growth of 21% in the last financial year, as compared to 9% for businesses reporting limited use of data. Data-led businesses also experienced a net profit margin of 22%, versus 14% achieved by small businesses in which data has a limited role.

In today's digital economy, companies see the revenue potential offered by data monetization and are striving to capitalize on it--preferably before their competitors do. This is particularly evident in the publishing industry, where some companies are already achieving incremental success by leveraging existing data about their consumers to generate new revenue streams. However, the majority of companies still need to determine how they want their organizations to leverage consumer data. More importantly, they need to consider how to synergize data trends emerging around both their existing base of consumers and a target demographic that may present new revenue opportunities, all of which is going through a degree of disruption in the market.

Two of the biggest challenges in designing and delivering organizational learning are determining what content your learners most need and want, and deciding what courses to develop and offer based on learner preferences and organizational needs. Get these two challenges right, and your organization wins with engaged learners who can move the company forward. Get them wrong, and you've wasted money and effort while alienating your learners.

During the great California gold rush, early prospectors sifted through rocks and streams in the hopes of finding a fortune. But bigger hauls were often claimed by going below the surface and digging deeply into mines, where a treasure trove of gold lay waiting to be unearthed. The gold rush may be ancient history, but there's still potential treasure to be tapped--and crises that can be prevented too-by companies that are willing to delve deep into their dark data.

The Paris terrorist attacks in November 2015 caused a seismic shift in many areas, including media discussions of Big Data, which now focus on the Internet of Things (IoT). At first, it may seem difficult to understand how the IoT and terrorism are related, but security involves both a nation's borders and its data. These concerns are prompting new conversations about the IoT's role in the future of the Big Data landscape.

Xillio, expert in the analysis, transformation and migration of unstructured data, announced version 3.0 of its Content ETL Platform. The new version of the platform is based on a completely new architecture including a new scripting language, which aims to make the platform much more stable and scalable. Also introduced in this version are the Universal Data Model and a new database (MongoDB). The platform is prepared to deal with the growing amount of content, and allows organizations to make quick changes in their information landscape.